You’ve brought your precious bundle home from the hospital, but now what do you do? How do you get her to go to sleep at a reasonable hour? When do you give naps? To swaddle or not to swaddle: that is the question. Below are the 10 essential tips every parent needs to know so that the entire family is well rested.
1. Bigger is better!
At bedtime, put him in a diaper that’s one size bigger than he normally wears. This way, he shouldn’t soak through his diaper or pajamas. The last thing you want is to have your baby wake you up at 3:00 a.m. because he needs a diaper change. It’s also no fun to have to change wet sheets every morning because your little one has peed through everything!
2. More is less!
At bedtime, slather on some type of ointment on his bottom, like Desitin. If he is in a wet or messy diaper all night, the more ointment he has on the better protected against wetness and the less likely he will be to get a rash. I think you should only change a baby’s diaper at night for the first month or so and then expect him to keep the same one on all night. If you are breastfeeding, you need to check for output the first few weeks of your baby’s life. The only reason I continued to change my little one’s diapers for a few weeks longer was to wake him up because he’d fall asleep while nursing.
3. Swaddle, don’t coddle!
Two weeks of age seems to be about the time when newborns decide they don’t want to sleep so much. When you first bring them home from the hospital, they sleep so much it’s crazy. But by two weeks of age, if they’re like my kids, it’s like a light switch is flipped on and all of a sudden babies tend to cry when you try to lay them down or they’ll fall asleep while you’re feeding them but five minutes after you lay them down they wake up crying. At this point, instead of trying to coddle your newborn and do everything possible to lull him to sleep, try swaddling him if you haven’t started already! I started swaddling my youngest baby at probably about a week. He’s now almost six months and I’m just now weaning him from being swaddled. With three other kids to give attention to, getting him to sleep for long periods of time has been a key part of my sanity! And it’s all due to swaddling.
On a side note, when you’re ready to wean your little one from being swaddled, try taking only one hand out first and see how she does with that. If she fusses and doesn’t sleep, re-swaddle and try taking an arm out again a week or two later. If she responds well, after a few days with one arm out, take out the other arm. This is a perfect time to transition her to a sleep sack which will keep her warm and snuggly while she’s sleeping.
Halo Swaddle Sleep Sack
4. Two is the magic number!
Do your best to lay your little one down for a nap within two hours of the time he woke up. My baby is usually ready for a nap after about an hour and a half of being awake. You may be hesitant about getting your baby ready for a nap so soon after waking up, but it truly is for the best. The one time I don’t follow this guideline is after the afternoon nap. There’s so much going on with getting kids from the bus stop, getting dinner ready, homework, and all the other craziness of family life at that time of day that it would be too loud and chaotic for the baby to be able to sleep. So he’s awake for more like three or four hours before he finally goes to bed at night.
5. Don’t sweat the noise!
Whatever you do, don’t tiptoe around the house when Baby is sleeping, especially during the day. I’m a little more careful about noise at night, but during the day, when the 3 older kids are awake and playing (sometimes) or arguing (often), there’s really nothing I can do to keep them quiet, so from the day I brought our youngest child home from the hospital, I have more often than not laid the baby down for a nap in the midst of our everyday chaos.
6. Here’s the buzz!
While I do not sweat over the normal din of an active household, I have played both a radio and a white noise machine for all of our kids when they were babies. These appliances are valuable for two important reasons. First of all, if you play a some background music or white noise, it can serve as a cue that it’s time to sleep. I only turn the white noise on at nap or bed time, so the kids have always known that it signals the beginning of quiet sleeping time. Secondly, any noise you have in the room where your baby is sleeping can help drown out any noise in the house that you don’t want to startle your baby with. If you are anything like me, you know theoretically that your family doesn’t have to whisper while your baby is sleeping. Believe me, though, when you have three squabbling siblings who choose to rev up the noise level at nap time, knowing there’s some white noise in the baby’s room to muffle some of that undesirable noise can lower your blood pressure level quite a bit!
Sound Sleeper by Dex Baby Products
7. Routine!
Everyone knows that babies and children thrive on routine. I firmly believe that it’s more important to have a routine established so that everyone in the house knows the order of events and the way the day will unfold than to have a schedule that is based on the clock. Working around a clock can be hard to do with just one baby, but it’s impossible with 4 young children!
If you follow this order of events, your baby should be able to go to sleep on his own when you lay him down awake in his crib: feed/wake/sleep. When you build your day around this cycle, and remember that the magic number is 2, you’ll be good to go! I got trapped into a bad habit of nursing my youngest baby to sleep for naps for the first 3 or 4 months. With the craziness of the activities and schedules of my other three kids, the baby just got pushed the the side, so to speak. I didn’t really try to make any kind of routine or schedule for him.
So I tried feeding him as soon as he woke up and then getting him ready for a nap within 2 hours of when he woke up. (Yep, that 2-hour time frame is definitely KEY!) And when I laid him down in his crib, sure enough, more often than not, he goes to sleep even though I put him in his crib awake! It’s totally cool! Now that I use the order of feed/wake/sleep, my 6-month-old has a great daily routine. He takes two naps a day, typically anywhere from two to three hours long, and sometimes snoozes in his swing in the early evening when I am busy getting the other kids ready for bed first.
8. Baby’s Great Expectations!
We already know that establishing a reliable order of events to create a comfortable daily routine is key. But what about bedtime? It’s a great idea to have a set list of activities you do with your baby before he goes to sleep so that he has a clear signal that it’s bedtime and knows what to expect each night. I put the baby to bed after his older siblings are in bed. That way it’s a little quieter and calmer when I’m getting him ready to go to sleep. When he was just about a month old, I created a bedtime routine that I have only altered slightly 5 months later. My youngest has a bath, gets in his pjs and sleep sack, with the lights dimmed he snuggles up with lovey while I read a book (“Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown is one of my very favorites!), and then I turn on some white noise and I nurse him before putting him in his crib. I actually use a modified version of this routine at both nap times also. There are no dim lights, bath, or pjs, but he’s still in his sleep sack, we read a book, and then I turn on the white noise before I leave the room.
9. Nap time is your time!
Be firm about requiring your children to have nap time every day (with exceptions for special occasions, of course). As they get older and don’t actually need to sleep, require them to have quiet time in their rooms so that they still have some much-needed downtime and so that you get some of that downtime also! Our older kids have quiet time for the two-or-so hours that the younger ones sleep in the afternoon. My philosophy about this block of time is that as long as no one is getting hurt and nothing is being destroyed, it doesn’t really matter to me what the kids are doing in their rooms during quiet time. They can read, sing, play, or sleep.
10. Bend but don’t break!
Perhaps the best advice I can pass on to you is “be flexible”! The great thing about routine is that if one is firmly established, when you have to stray from it a bit or your timing is way off and you just can’t work with the magic number, your baby will be able to adapt to variations better than you think. Don’t underestimate his ability to go with the flow!
If you follow these suggestions, you will have a baby that actually sleeps, well…like a baby! Don’t be fooled, however, into thinking that she’ll sleep perfectly for you every time. At any time, a variety of factors could get in the way of her sleeping peacefully: a growth spurt, illness, and teething are just a few. Put on a happy face and do your best to stay positive; know that even though you may have a rough day here and there, things will get better because you have your routine to fall back on! And be sure to plan to do some fun things for you at the times you know she’ll be sleeping! Even after four kids, I still haven’t quite figured out how to do that, but at least the kids sleep!
Please share any tried-and-true tips you have for getting your baby to sleep!
